In this Marketing Over Coffee learn :

About getting your website to work for you, how to add energy to your next event, and great summer reading. All this and more…

Show length 22:17

Listen now: MP3 file

Brought to you by Blue Sky Factory and MarketingProfs

00:32 Five Guys in a limo from Scott “Mustang” Monty

00:52 Extreme Website Makeover for Keith – How to make your website work for you

06:36 Correctly configuring a redirect to a blog to not lose Google juice

11:03 WordPress redirection plugin

12:36 Getting started with AdWords

14:40 John T. on how to set up a stage or performance room

17:25 More summer reading Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice and TED Talk,
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational

18:15 MarketingProfs video coming soon, sorry for the wait, Chris has hardware in the shop.

Chris at Podcasters Across Borders and then Podcamp Boston 3

John is not travelling

Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall 0:19
Good morning Welcome to marketing over coffee. I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn and marketing over coffee today brought to you by blue sky factory, our email provider of choice and marketing profs you can check them out over MP Daily Fix calm and also buy five guys in a limo YouTube video of voiceover guys that I’ve talked about for like two or three weeks and I have to put a link in and this will remind me to do it. So if you’re into movie voiceovers, this is the video you must watch. Alright, so unless Alright, so we had we had Keith has emailed in and last week and this is kind of a theme you’ve been riding with recently which is great, which a lot of people have missed is that before you get involved in social media, you You have to have the underpinnings done, you have to have your site in order. And you have to have your SEO in order. Because if you’re going to have all the stuff generate traffic if then you can’t be found, you know, what’s the point? You’re totally lost? So what was the what was the asking about what let’s see, Keith said,

Christopher Penn 1:13
I want your advice is, how would I go about optimizing my site? I’m running on a blog platform, and I tried to do at least two posts a week. But what do I need to do in my niche to what sort of things should I or should I be doing? So I took a look at a site and I actually, well, you know, what we should call it so she calls me like the marketing over coffee in a clinic or, you know, beating site meeting, but if you want to follow along, go to magic Woodworks calm. The first thing you’ll notice is actually you’ll get redirected to something other than the magic wood works calm, you’ll get redirected to a blog. So that’s, that’s number one. No, no, there’s a bunch of structural things here that we need to address. First. One thing Google recommends is canonicalization. So choose either your domain name by itself or you know www. dot dot your domain name, but then put a 301 redirect in your, in your website so that no matter what someone types in, it goes to the one you’d pick. And most of the time people recommend no do www dot your domain name. com. Don’t redirect your blog. That’s that’s bad. It’s starting off your homepage with a redirect is is an SEO fail.

John Wall 2:21
not appreciate it. And I’m guilty of that crime myself. More than one place?

Christopher Penn 2:25
Yeah. So looking at a Keith site. Well, the first thing I noticed when the page loads is, well, there’s an awful lot of whitespace here up at the top. So you can see here, if you’re following along, there’s a huge chunk of whitespace whitespace. And this logo, there’s no immediate call to action. Like when you look at the page, I see you know, a legit widget and the first blog posts but really, if I popped in here, just unannounced I have absolutely no idea what the site is about. There’s a picture of a lightning bolt and, and and kind of cool looking logo but I have no idea why I’m here or what’s what’s going to happen and more importantly, what was Keith wants me to do.

John Wall 3:01
Right? Well, yeah, and this is one thing you can see. I mean, because he’s got a square logo over there. So it’s kind of messing with the layout if he went with a more of a banner along, you know, 600 pixel by 120, or whatever. And then to the right of that he could throw a newsletter sign up, right? Yeah,

Christopher Penn 3:16
exactly. And that’s, that’s the key thing, is it worth the bat is have a way of, you know, building your database right off the rails and build your house right off the front now, but either you maybe have two or three things up at the top, I would say the obvious contact method because you want people to this is actually an e commerce site to sell his woodworking which is very good. I mean, he’s a very talented woodworker. But there’s, you know, you need a contact form of some way you need an ad newsletter or it was spilled or something and then you have to at least to let people know if not at the top of the page fairly close to the top of the page, where you can buy the stuff, right right where they go to but

John Wall 3:54
that, you know, an elevator pitch would be good along with the logo to something Yeah,

Christopher Penn 3:57
totally, or a tagline or something like If we look at the source code on the site, if you go to View Source in your browser, you’ll see that there’s actually just the title of the page is called Magic Woodworks, which could be anything.

John Wall 4:10
Right. Right, right. Get the word idea. And that’s about it.

Christopher Penn 4:13
Yeah, I’m barely. So those are the, you know, the structural issues that, you know, Keith needs to resolve right away that before you even get to talking about SEO, this is just you know, basics, the basics of the basics, contact form list builders stuff, because if you follow the School of database driven marketing, it’s all about the database. The next set of stuff is all SEO stuff. You know, you got to start with the purpose of the site. If the site’s purpose is to sell your stuff. He needs to take a look at what keywords he wants to use. So if you pop into Google AdWords here, his site is talks a lot about woodturning. But I did a quick check into AdWords and woodturning is popular but tends to be the searches for that tend to be related to people who want to learn about how to do it, or buy tools to do it neither of which he sells, right The things that he’s selling, you know, handmade wooden bowls or wood bowls or whatever and handcrafted wood. That’s really the sets of keywords, you should be focusing on using that as the lead off, you know, handcrafted wood, art or whatever, by Keith bertus. at, you know, at magic wood works would be probably a better title for the page and a better way to select what it is that he wants to have the search engines focused on what he wants to have people focus on. So the store, like this legit widget is just a gigantic waste of space.

John Wall 5:34
Right? That’s a lot of real estate and a lot of real estate.

Christopher Penn 5:37
You’ll put your store at the top.

Unknown Speaker 5:39
Yeah.

John Wall 5:41
It’s your money at the top of that.

Christopher Penn 5:42
Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s the second thing now put that up top, you know, and maybe instead of having three little thumbnails which kind of hard to see have one featured item, you know that with a larger resolution picture and you can see Oh, that’s really really attractive or or whatever. The last part after that is look at you know, the different trends for you know, what people are searching for in terms of all the woodworking things to watch your whole keyword list through Google Trends. See what comes up, you come up with that. And the last thing I have to point out before we move on is, dude, you have 18 inbound links. Yeah, that’s, that’s rough. Yeah, that’s rough. So you know, the recipe for growth is going to be get the structural issues of the site all tuned up, all fixed up, make it user friendly, make it buyer friendly, make plentiful opportunities for conversion, and then do your SEO stuff and you should be in you know, relatively good basic shape to get I saw

John Wall 6:33
how about the, the redirect to the blog, because a lot of people do this where you buy a domain, and they have the home homepage, just redirect immediately right to the gate of the blog. Like what’s the easiest way to get around that? How should he installed the blog software at the root level of the domain? Okay, so you do you buy that domain and you install the blog stuff yourself? You don’t redirect to somebody? Yeah,

Christopher Penn 6:52
if that that domain name is the one that you want to be associated with. You need to be having everything running natively on it. If it’s If you just a bunch of bundles of a bunch of domains for fun, or to hold on to them, you don’t really care about them. Like if you go to awaken your superhero.com that goes to my blog Redux Christian recipes calm but that’s not what I’m focusing on.

John Wall 7:11
Right. Right. Well, that’s there for people that type in that domain if people want that, but you’re not. Yeah, because that’s as far as this link problems. That’s a big gap point of it if people are linking to this and Google just doesn’t like it right from the gate page. You’re not going to get it

Christopher Penn 7:24
Yeah. So yeah, it’s there’s there’s a lot of there’s a lot of other stuff you can do later on down the road, but the basics definitely are still missing here. And the other thing I was gonna suggest and this is something for almost all bloggers to do, if this is his his or you know, as Keith has expressed, really wants it to be his primary business. The first couple of blog posts really don’t have anything to do with you know, from a keyword perspective about what it is he’s doing. I would suggest you know, if you want to do stuff like you know, personal blogging with the key by Keith burnish.com, and do all your personal fun stuff, they like hey, here’s what you want. On My Mind, here’s what I’m listening to and keep this focused on your stuff. And the first the first stuff here where you can actually even think about buying something is a Twitter friend discount blog post which is a third of the way down the page. Right right

John Wall 8:13
yeah yeah I have this right had this be store have your personal so you can have your about the artist page and that goes over to the blog. Yeah, where you can do other stuff

Christopher Penn 8:20
there. And also you use the term use the keywords that you want to have in here. So this there’s a blog post here called Twitter friend discount. But I would I would say maybe handcrafted you know, would bold discounts for friends so that your keywords right at the beginning your blog post because your blog post titles make a huge difference when people are searching in Google blog search for terms Google blog search loves in nice, you know, the loves the keywords to be in the in the title of the post,

John Wall 8:47
right? Well, yeah. And then there’s two other things I was thinking he should I mean, obviously, he’s an artist here to master so he needs to, he can become a thought leader on two positions. One would be determined, you know, right. How to buy good quality woodworking items. You know, if I was looking to buy wood balls, you know, why should I buy Brand X versus brand wire? What am I looking for? What are the top 10 things to look for? And then the other one you talked about too, there’s a real difference between people that want to buy this stuff versus people that want to learn how to do this. Yeah, and, you know, do I do Amazon reviews, go to Amazon review any tools that are out there? if they have any stuff up there? Do you know your own page of the top 10 things you need to get started with this? And then become an Amazon affiliate to you know, have links in your blog and get paid for referring people to the right tools? Yeah, tools, books, you name all that all that stuff? Oh, yeah, books. Sure. There must be a ton of books on this stuff.

Christopher Penn 9:40
I would assume so in woodturning seems to be a relatively popular search term. Yeah. The other thing is, you have a basic set of stuff. You know, in terms of content, your photos and videos and stuff like that. Maybe make better use of that. And and show people you know, there’s one poster called Art starts ugly and this picture in this post and this sort of an end picture you know of what it turns into. But there’s not a lot of intermediate stuff along the way. Maybe even do a video podcast of sorts. If you check out upstart cooking calm the way they do their videos for cooking you know, it’s very very it’s unique visual style. But what’s even better about it is that it trims it turns out all the fat of you know, your typical how to video it’s literally, I think, maybe 4050 seconds to make a dish and start cooking because they they just, you know, trim out all the other stuff and they have it’s like stop motion almost. You could do the same thing with the woodturning like, here’s this nobody has to watch you operate in LA but you could just taking a couple of really fast pictures. Follow that visual style and bang you’ve got a 32nd podcast that shows people you know what you’re doing is when all the pictures but they don’t have to sit there and watch 20 minutes you using a life.

John Wall 10:47
Right? What was it? I mean, a lot of that genre is is really more entertainment. Yeah. Listening to the chef gab about you know where they’ve been and blah, blah, blah, go buy my book, yada yada. Which you can Oh yeah, let’s do a book. That’s, that’s another huge one. But um, yeah,

Christopher Penn 11:03
in terms of the site basics as those to get you started, it’s good that you’re using WordPress as the back end, what I would suggest doing is install the redirection plugin for WordPress. So that when you move the blog, move the whole site from the this blog directory down to the main site, the redirection plugin will automatically 301 all your old URLs to the new ones, so you won’t lose any PageRank that way.

John Wall 11:23
That’s excellent. Yeah, that’s I will be eventually I one of these days, I will get my own personal blog straightened out. You know, because it’s so funny. This is just one of the classic things where you kind of make the decision, you’re like, Okay, I could spend, you know, x days fixing this project now that I don’t know whether it’s gonna fly or not. Or I could take the easy way out, which then will be an even bigger headache if it actually does catch fire, which, which is this is where we’re at. We’re at the headache.

Christopher Penn 11:51
The other thing is you It looks like you’ve got the all in one SEO pack plugin turned on and it’s not doing wonders for you. If you look at what it’s doing. It’s dumping a bunch of keywords. Enter into your code and and not really relevant, like, you know, big question efficiency and so on and so forth. So you’ll want to tune up that plugin, take some time to read the manual on it and and make sure it’s working to to your benefit as opposed to against you. Because right now, it’s just stuffing a whole bunch of terms into your page. And that’s, that’s not wonderful.

John Wall 12:18
Yeah, I in some ways, part of me is almost given up on keywords. But it’s, I would shave it down to three or four that you really want to rank for. And go for that one. How about are you showed the keywords? Is he actually doing any Google AdWords? Did he mention if he’s actually using those? Not all word of mouth stuff right now there’s a whole nother thing. I mean, you can get in there for you know, for less than 50 bucks a day, month even you could at least start to play with that. Yeah. Because I think you know, somebody’s searching for, you know, wooden bowl. That’s a pretty, you know, they’re looking to buy a wooden ball. There’s so much else that they’d be searching for. It’s like, is it to make one

Christopher Penn 12:51
yeah, there was a great post actually yesterday on. SEO landers are generally someone has someone say about using the content network for a search a lot. people including myself turned off the content network when you think about AdWords because you tend to get really really really crappy results out of it right? And there’s one author and I wish I could remember who it was that suggested you have your search network campaign but it’s set up as completely separate content network only campaign with a really really finely tuned keyword so in Keith’s case would be handcrafted wooden bowl right as your turn and make it the explicit term, no broad match. So you only get traffic and people who are no tightly focused on those terms.

John Wall 13:28
Right. Exactly. That’s, yeah, that’s a great point. because like you said, it’s those are very crappy quality, but you do it just goes so wide. You go to millions of sites now. I mean, it goes everywhere. So yeah, if you get laser focused, you can do all right with them.

Christopher Penn 13:42
Yeah. So anyway, Keith, hopefully that’s helpful. Let us know how it turns out. And you know, if you want us to come and kick you in the teeth again, let us live another

John Wall 13:50
dream home makeover. Get an extreme.

Christopher Penn 13:54
And yeah, if anyone wants to buy a number of folks on Twitter in the in the new media sphere have bought his products and said they’re there. Fantastic products so you know it’d be really cool as if he were able to get some new media testimonials from his customers you know, should have a quick YouTube video whatever saying hey, this is my new whatever. Oh, that’s a good idea your testimonials count for a hell of a lot. Much plenty

John Wall 14:13
of people more than willing to pimp themselves on video you should take advantage of that and leverage that absolute much like Jennifer and her her social media expert auction there. Keep those guys out. Yes, she made a ton of money. It was beautiful. It’s a wonderful thing, digging into the mailbag. Here I heard from Johnny T, who is a guy that I worked with years ago to deepen the tradeshow wars and it he was very impressed with are having your booth staff dressed in street clothes to not make your booth look like the shark tank. And he threw over another tip actually, that he uses all the time that he likes. If you’re a vendor and you’re setting up one of these demo stations, this happens a lot of times that trade shows where people build their booth and they put like a little 10 or 15 seat theater in the booth so that people can sit down and watch To the show. And the key to that is always go to the small side, right? If you have five seats, and they’re full, and there’s three people standing in back, that does infinitely better than if you have 30 seats, and there’s only eight of them fine, because if it looks empty, it’s not going to create any buzz. And this rolls over into pretty much everything you do in marketing. It’s like, if you have a party, the room needs to be, you know, err on the smaller side. Speaking presentations on the side of a small room, again, you’re always you’re creating this perception with the space and empty space sucks energy out of whatever you’re doing. If the space is tight, and people are forced to be close together, that creates energy and emotion and you don’t want to get don’t short circuit yourself. You have to go through so much work to get all this stuff done. To be beaten in the last hour by a logistical thing. It’s just we don’t want that to happen to you.

Christopher Penn 15:49
I’ve had that happen as I’ve had the experience as a speaker I usually because I’m relatively new to whatever speaking circuit I’m on, I’ll get one of the smaller venues and inevitably there’s like Four or five rows deep of standing room only in the back and stuff. And yeah, the energy is really different. It’s really PodCamp New York was a classic example. There are people sitting on the floor, they’re sitting, you know, there are people actually leaning in the door from outside the hallway, to listen in on stuff. And that really does change how people perceive, you know, the popularity of anything.

John Wall 16:20
Yeah. Because they’re forced into closer quarters. And if everybody’s spread out then now it becomes like a World War kind of all relaxing here, right? Whereas if you’re having to like shuffle yourself into a space you’re you’re you know, it’s a whole different thing. Maybe that’s the whole strategy behind like the airlines. We can’t Yeah, we can’t see it from here there’s Olive Garden down the street. The rumor is they’ve always had the the strategy of rooms are always closed down to keep at least a little bit of a line in the in the front waiting room. And, and the other one too, is that it’s always the under was it over promised under deliver No. Under promise under promise over deliver. Yeah, that would work. Really good. That’s kind of a phone company mentality. But you come in and they say, Oh, yeah, that’s about a 10 minute wait, but don’t worry. And you always get pulled in like in two minutes. And so immediately right out of the gate, you’re like, Wow, this is great. We got in early. Whoo. You know, meanwhile, there’s like four rooms empty in the back with the staff sleeping, but it doesn’t matter. You know, you’re feeling great. Right from from day one. All right. So the summer book list on your recommendation, and from his profs pitch I finished Dan Ariely predictably irrational, which was great. And it was funny, it reminds me of another book to Barry Schwartz is Paradox of Choice.

Christopher Penn 17:37
Yes, he did a great TED talk on that. Oh, did you really? Yeah.

John Wall 17:41
Oh, okay. I’ll have to check that out then. Because Yeah, he does a great chapter. And the other thing that was funny, so both those are definitely worth reading. Some interesting stuff like I’m pricing that I liked on both of those, kind of, especially with the scenario is the fact that you know, pricing things more, gives more benefit to your customer, you know, If there’s two products and yours costs a lot more, just by buying the better one, they’re gonna feel better just because they think they’ve bought the better one. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the same product under the under the, under the hood. So that was important.

Christopher Penn 18:14
Oh, quick update for marketingprofs. A couple of folks asked where the marketingprofs conference content was my MacBook Pro is actually in the shop. It had a little display issue and stuff. So I’ve been on the powerbook g4 for about a week. There’s no video editing to be done. When the MacBook Pro does get back from the shop, which should be any day now an apple just shipped it back to me. We’ll be able to resume work on getting a lot of stuff. We’ll have the two keynotes out first, Dan Ariely and David meerman. Scott, because they were both very, very, you know, outstanding sessions just why they were the keynotes. But that will be reduced problems that will be coming It’s just a

John Wall 18:52
have some production delays in the works. That sounds good. Yeah, actually, I’m Ron blue from run amok.com recorded Session a PR say well that you send it over to me so I gotta check that yeah you know it’s like sits in the bin one of these days we’ll get to the to the video pile

Christopher Penn 19:08
yeah oh it’s it’s I have that problem I literally have no for Matthew by Louis have no issue fewer than five concerts recorded and stuff that I’ve just not not don’t have time to process I’ve got videos literally from as far back as PodCamp Boston to have processed them still in the bin. I my hard drive is full of stuff that I need if I could afford on my own personal time and you know a new media intern or something. I would hire them in a minute. It’s like you’re just cutting all the video fly titling to it and publish it

John Wall 19:36
right? Yeah, yeah, just put the front end and back end on so you can roll it if you know someone who’d like to work as an unpaid

Unknown Speaker 19:43
intern for the great summer job.

Christopher Penn 19:46
Christopher Penn media empire by all means, please leave a comment on marketing over coffee calm. We’ve got a ton of stuff. Yeah, just gotta get a process

John Wall 19:56
things ready. Ready to go. All right. On the road tour with the summer is finally here the summer of weddings continues for me PodCamp Austin’s the next next one I have in the hopper How about for yourself?

Christopher Penn 20:07
That’s he actually today I’m over at Northeastern University for financial aid conference. Then this weekend podcasts across borders up in Kingston, Ontario be driving up on Friday with Mr. Brogan and Michelle Pixie so it’ll be a very entertaining trip just getting there it’s gonna be entertaining because a I drive like a lunatic and I don’t believe either of them has been in the car with me for more than like so number seven now that I don’t forget your passports and helmets.

Unknown Speaker 20:36
In fact, paste your password to your helmet. And you’ll be all set. Exactly. And Nico

Christopher Penn 20:42
Yeah, then PodCamp Boston up to 240 people registered. They were actually just got venue stuff, you know, worked out so in terms of catering and things we’re gonna have, you know, really just basic coffee and water and things and let people kind of forge for for their own stuff, but yeah, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be fantastic. We’ve got a huge Add like 10 or 12 people just yesterday, I just was fantastic. So if you are thinking about coming, we have a hard limit of 480. We’re halfway there. So the sooner would be better than later to register. Because the other thing is seven days before the event, the ticket price will double because it’s called the failure to plan ahead. Right and you have a lot you know, giving a lot of time to make sure that people you know, who can’t afford to go can scrape up the meal, the money graduate and seven days before the event. You should know whether you’re coming,

John Wall 21:28
right? Well, there’s a whole class of people that like are gonna wait right until they know what the weather’s like, and everything else. Yeah. So you know, beat those people up. If their schedules are so important. They can cough up the extra 50 bucks. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. All right. Good deal with that, folks. Enjoy the coffee. Enjoy the coffee.

Unknown Speaker 21:44
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more at Christopher penn.com Mr. Wolf logs daily at Ronan marketeers.com and podcasts, the end show every Monday

John Wall 22:04
the marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network calm or follow the link in our show notes.